At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.
Interpretation
Despite challenges to faith throughout history, it has ultimately persevered.
Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the resilience of the Christian Faith in the face of various intellectual challenges posed by skeptics throughout history. The quote suggests that, while it may have seemed like faith was failing or at risk due to figures such as Voltaire and Darwin, it is instead these critics who have ultimately faltered, underscoring the enduring strength of belief.
In practice
A speaker at a religious conference might use this quote to emphasize the historical strength of faith.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
It is the responsibility of the citizens to support their government. It is not the responsibility of the government to support its citizens.
War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy. If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.
Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
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